CEO Sustainability Series | Nathaëlle Davoust, General Manager, Melvita

Question 1: How does Melvita integrate sustainability into its overall business strategy?

Melvita has been a pioneer of organic skincare for 40 years. Our mission has now become to positively impact the living through “regeneration”. This means we aim at going beyond minimizing our impact or neutralizing it. We work towards a net positive impact for eco systems and society, on 3 levels:

• Positive impact on the skin. We reset the skin back to its original balance with safe, transparent formulas. Our naturality rate is  above 99%; all our formulas are Organic certified. We use as much of the plant as possible; and most often, our formulation goes beyond the certification requirements to deliver an outstanding mix of pleasure, efficiency and safety.

• Positive impact on People. We aim at respecting and supporting all our communities (colleagues, suppliers, clients). We develop products with our clients; we are working on Great Place to Work certifications for our colleagues. We already have fair trade certified partnerships, the main one being Argan: we have worked with 200 women, themselves employed in 5 cooperatives, in Morocco since 2014. Under the Fair For Life certification, we commit to purchasing for 3 year minimum, at a price that is 10% higher than market, and we reinvest 5% locally. We also added "People" and “Planet” criteria in our staff incentive, to make sure projects related to our societal impact would be taken as priorities.

• Positive impact on the planet. We work in a way that preserves, and when possible regenerates, biodiversity. Our ingredients are picked following a strict “Harvesting Charter” by people who are trained on how to harvest without threatening or deleting any natural resources in the process. Our rinsed formulas are 98.3% easily biodegradable. Our original factory in Ardèche is constantly improving its ecological impact (100% renewable energy, ISO14001 certification, reuse of rainwater). We are working with the L’Occitane Group to reduce our carbon impact; today we have 83% of recycled plastic in our bottles, while our floral waters have already switched to 100% recycled plastic 9 years ago !

Question 2: What are Melvita’s key sustainability initiatives and commitments?

Since 2010, through the Melvita Foundation, we have supported over 80 projects to protect biodiversity, promote beekeeping, and save bees. We also took an agroecological and peoplecentric approach, promoting our producers’ social advancement. In 2020, we joined forces with France Nature Environnement to raise awareness among farmers about the importance of withdrawing pesticides. In 2021, we partnered with the GoodPlanet Foundation (and Yann Arthus-Bertrand) to support projects focused on the transition to agroecology and agroforestry, for higher soil regeneration. Today, preserving biodiversity has never been so essential, therefore we are taking these actions to the next level: in 2023, to celebrate 40 years of commitments, Melvita is partnering with WWF France to protect sea turtles in French Guiana and New Caledonia. This project aims at deploying 45 GPS beacons on the back of the turtles to follow their migration.

Today, we are relaunching Melvita, for even greener packagings, including refills for most of our products, follow us!